J. Anthony Allen shows how to position studio monitors to fix acoustic problems in small rooms. The three rules: keep speakers away from walls and corners, place them equidistant from surfaces, and point them at your listening spot. He covers workarounds for bedroom and garage studios where perfect placement isn't possible.
Okay, so let's talk about some simple acoustic things you can do in your room to make it better. So I've drawn a box here, and let's assume this is our room. Okay. And this is our desk. All right, so let's figure out the best place to put our speakers. Now, we're going to do this in a little bit more scientific way in a minute, but this is just kind of a general thing. First of all, if this is your setup, let's pull your desk out a little bit. You don't want to be right up against the wall. Leave a little bit of space here. Let's say this is a speaker. That's kind of a big speaker, probably. Okay, so here's a speaker, and here's a speaker. We always have two, right? Okay. So obviously, we want them in a stereo pair, so on the opposite sides of each other. Now, we could put them right here. Right. If we're sitting right here, let's make a little. Okay, that's us. That's where we sit. We're gonna sit right in that hexagon. That what that is. Whatever. This is where we sit right in the middle. Okay. So now we've got the speakers pointed right at us. So they'd be pointed this way, right at our face. Okay, that's pretty good. However, this causes one problem that we want to avoid, which is we have the speakers right up against the back wall. We don't want to do that. So I would pull them out to here, get overlap. I'm assuming they're sitting on top of the desk or on a stand or something. So let's be sure they're symmetrical here. But we don't want them right against the wall. So make sure your speakers are pulled out a little bit from the wall. Another thing you might want to do is put them in the corners, because that tends to look kind of good. But corners are even worse than the wall. You don't want your speakers in the corners. So away from the wall, not in the corner of a room. Another thing that we want to avoid is. Let's do this. Let's say that if your listening room is doubling as a bedroom, you might not be able to put your desk right in the center. You might have your desk over here or something like that. Okay. If this is your case, this is also not good. And when I say not good, what I'm saying is it's not perfect. But I get that a lot of you are probably working in a bedroom, a small apartment, maybe a garage, a Basement. So you do what you can. Right. If you have to do one of these things, that's not good. Whatever, you know, you'll be fine. But try to avoid these things if you can. The reason this is not good is because we have this speaker, and it's close to this wall, and it's also kind of in a corner. And this one is not close to a wall. We want these to have similar kinds of things happening to them. Right. So this one is close to two walls, actually, and this one is close to one wall. So we don't like that. It would be better to have this right in the dead center of the room if we had to. Right. Because then the speakers, the distance to the walls are both the same. Okay. But if you want to do this, this would probably be the best. Something like this. Okay, so we've got speakers not up against the wall, with a little space here, and the space here, I'd say, you know, if you can get a foot of space between the speaker and the wall, that would be great. If you can only get 6 inches, that's fine too. Here we've got plenty of space this way. We've got speakers pointed right at us. They are not symmetrical, but that's just because of my drawing here. Is that symmetrical? That looks symmetrical. Okay. We want these totally symmetrical, and we want them pointed right at us. And this is something that we're going to do a little bit more in a minute. We're going to talk about how to measure this space and get it just right. So we'll talk about this angle and everything in a second. But those are three things you can do to make your room sound a whole lot better. Okay. Stay away from the walls, stay away from the corners, and make sure that your speakers are the same amount of distance away from whatever walls or corners that they are close to. Right. So this distance, roughly the same as this distance. Right. I don't know why I just got arrows there, but that's great. That's what I wanted. And this distance is the same as this distance. Okay. That's the perfect situation. Cool. Okay, so common acoustic problems that you can easily solve. All right, let's move on to what kind of studio monitors to look for.
